Hasta La Gadget!

Got a hankering for smaller, faster, more capacious magnetic storage? Compellent says you’ll get it soon, at long as you’re buying for the IT market. According to The Register, the enterprise storage provider listed 900GB, 10,000RPM 2.5-inch hard drives on its product roadmap, as well as 300GB models that spin at 15,000RPM. Sure, we’ve seen smallish drives with those speeds or that capacity before, and you can get a 600GB, 10,000RPM Velociraptor even in the consumer marketplace, but it seems like the puzzle pieces are all coming together. Quick disclaimer: Compellent doesn’t actually make hard drives, but it most certainly sells them, so we’d expect a company in their position to know what’s what. That, or they could be making stuff up. Perhaps platter density makes those sizes and capacities inevitable, but we can’t pretend that we’re not jazzed about the possibilities.

Distributor roadmap shows super speedy 900GB, 2.5-inch HDD originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 06 May 2010 15:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you’ve ever felt the sting of losing vital information due to drive failure, then you also know the importance of recovering it. Today, Kroll Ontrack announced enhancements to its data recovery technology that makes recovering information from Flash drives and SSDs easier and faster than before.

Although Flash memory typically fails less frequently than traditional hard drives do, recovering
the data can be trickier: SSDs employ “wear leveling” techniques
whereby information is evenly distributed across random blocks of the
memory chip, whereas with traditional spinning hard drives, data is stored
linearly and concentrically, making it easier to recover. Kroll’s new toolkit allows Ontrack’s recovery wizards to retrieve data from Flash memory more quickly and with a higher success rate. It also increases the integrity of the information recovered.

If you’re need information restored, Kroll Ontrack offers a free initial consultation for customers experiencing a
data loss.

It was inevitable, really. Samsung’s not-so-storied Story hard drive first took the leap to eSATA in November of last year, and for those always in need of the latest and / or greatest, now this very drive has made the logical leap to SuperSpeed. Introduced today as the fastest Story of all time, there’s actually not much else that’s changed besides the addition of a USB 3.0 socket — the enclosure’s the same, the capacity choices are the same (1TB or 2TB), and it’s still unlikely to truly solve all of your problems in one fell swoop. That said, the removal of eSATA here may be a detractor for some, but we’re told that the USB 2.0 + eSATA version will still be around in some parts of the globe. Check this one starting today for an undisclosed amount.

Update: The Samsung Story Station 3.0 comes in 1TB, 1.5TB and 2TB capacities, with suggested retail pricing of $154.99, $194.99 and $269.99, respectively. Also, Storage Review has their review up now.

Samsung’s 1TB / 2TB external Story hard drive goes the USB 3.0 route originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 26 Apr 2010 11:13:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Give your car an upgrade: Toshiba just announced a 200GB hard disk drive for the car, the largest automotive-grade drive on the market. Known by the poetic name of MK2060GSC, this 4,200-rpm SATA drive provides vehicle-systems manufacturers with high-capacity storage for telematics, navigation, and entertainment systems.

Toshiba has already shipped 14 million automotive-grade HDDs worldwide, and had 75 percent of the global market in 2009. With more classes of auto offering in-dash infotainment systems, that number should only increase.

With the MK2060GSC, Toshiba is delivering a 78 percent improvement on internal transfer rates, a seek time of 12 milliseconds, and quiet operation. It will be commercially available in the third quarter.

While it’s only a matter of time before solid state storage becomes cheap and reliable enough to replace magnetic media for good, companies like Western Digital are still finding ways to keep those platters a’ spinning. Take this new WD VelociRaptor VR200M, for instance. Critics agree that while it doesn’t offer anywhere near SSD levels of performance, it’s certainly the fastest rotational SATA drive ever tested — 15 to 30 percent improved over the last generation of VelociRaptors, depending on the benchmark — and at roughly 50 cents per gigabyte for the three-platter, 600GB WD6000BLHX ($329), it offers more capacity than any SSD you could hope to buy without refinancing your third vacation home. Reviewers note that with a 15mm drive height, you still won’t be dropping one of these speed demons in your new laptop, and your desktop might be better off with a cheaper 7200RPM drive paired with a similarly inexpensive SSD, but if you’re looking for that single drive that does it all, the new VelociRaptor is your best bet. Hit the links below for the full skinny, and a deep, deep dive into the fascinating world of IOPS, read speeds and write times.

Read – TechReport
Read – AnandTech
Read – PC Perspective
Read – HotHardware
Read – Tom’s Hardware
Read – ExtremeTech
Read – LegitReviews
Read – StorageReview
Read – DesktopReview

Western Digital VelociRaptor VR200M review roundup: fast, capacious, but no SSD originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 06 Apr 2010 21:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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